Techno tourism in Detroit – what do visitors owe the city that created the music?

In 1997, I was one of relatively few tourists in Detroit. Well before #vanlife was a hashtag, I left my home state of California and drove around the country for five months living in a 1982 Volkswagen Vanagon. Though I had few planned stops, Detroit was on my itinerary because I was a raver and I knew that techno originated in Detroit. After my trip, I applied to grad school at the University of Michigan with the plan to make Detroit electronic music my research topic. I moved from Ann Arbor to Detroit during grad school. Since that time, I have been not only an ethnographer of Detroit techno and house, but also a committed city resident, property owner and now parent of a high school student in a Detroit public school. A lot has changed since I moved to Detroit to study its music scene, including the growth of Movement Festival, a free electronic dance music festival, which started in 2000. It is now ticketed and draws 90,000 attendees, a mix of locals and tourists, over Memorial Day weekend while the city fills up with others who skip the festival but attend day parties and after-parties. Longtime Detroiters who…

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